Belgium's Prime Minister Resigns

PARIS — Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene of Belgium resigned on Monday after voters swept away his center-left coalition government in elections on Sunday.

The government had been heavily criticized for its handling of a dioxin scare that cleared poultry, beef, eggs and butter from food stores and frightened countries around the world into halting food imports from Europe.

Dehaene, 59, who was Europe's senior statesman after seven years in office, said he was thinking of quitting politics.

"I think that for myself it is time to start doing other things," Dehaene said in Brussels on Monday.

The 15-nation European Union is unhappy with Dehaene's decision late last week to put food products certified as safe back on the shelves and clear them for export. The union's agricultural experts said they were not convinced by Belgium's assurances that it had identified all of the meat-producing customers of a company that supplied them earlier this year with animal and chicken feed contaminated by fuel oil containing cancer-causing dioxin.

Dehaene, who is from the Flemish-speaking northern part of Belgium, said it was important to form a new government quickly to deal with the crisis. But Belgian politics are so fragmented across ideological, ethnic and linguistic lines that it takes months after an election to put a coalition together.

The two biggest regions -- the prosperous north, where the language is close to Dutch, and the unemployment-ridden industrial rust belt in the French-speaking south -- are almost like separate countries, each with its own political parties, labor unions, television and radio stations.

With Brussels and a small German-speaking region in the east, they share passports, armed forces, a national railroad system, and a king, Albert II, who accepted Dehaene's resignation offer on Monday.

Dehaene's Christian Democrat Party in Flanders won 14 percent of the vote, 3.2 percentage points fewer than it did in 1995. With the biggest single share of the vote won by the pro-business Liberal Party in French-speaking Wallonia, with 24.3 percent of the vote and 41 seats in the 150-member parliament, there was speculation that its leader, Louis Michel, could be the next prime minister. .

Environmentalist parties made gains, with 20 seats, but so did the ultra-nationalist Vlaams Blok party in the Flemish-speaking part of the country. It will have 15 seats and wants independence for Flanders.